App Spotlight: Run Roo Run

Gaming apps are meant to be fun, exciting, sometimes challenging, and addictive. If not, they don’t really have a leg to stand on when it comes to being the “App of the Week” or a reason to bring in so many users over its course on the App Store. Run Roo Run is an incredibly fun, super exciting, amazingly challenging, and problematically addictive game. It treats itself in little bursts, but the game continues to get harder and add more and more little extras to help you advance, making it one you keep coming back to.

Design

We all know graphics don’t make the game. Especially considering, in times like today, you can’t expect a beautiful game to have the best gameplay when some of our beloved titles are still made in 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit varieties. However, Run Roo Run isn’t worrying about graphics as much as it is its design. The design of the app itself looks wondrously delightful. When you load up the app, you are shown a very short comic strip of events prefacing your adventure in the game and then you are thrown in. You simply play each level, jump at the opportune moments, and proceed. However, it’s not done in a repetitive or ugly manner – it’s gorgeous. I would go on to explain how well it looks and how captivating it is, but you’d benefit more from seeing it yourself.

Gameplay

Simple. You are placed in a game, presented with obstacles and you, as a mother Kangaroo, must jump at the correct time to advance to the next level. The gameplay gets more challenging as you advance, but then come the extreme levels. With these levels, you may find yourself ripping your hair out, throwing your phone around, or harming a small child. These levels are no joke. It may seem easy as you first start, but there will, without doubt, be at least one level where you find yourself having trouble. This adds to the game, in my opinion. You’re given a fun game to play, you can breeze through it, if you want to, but then you’re exposed to extreme levels which bring out the real gamer in all of us.

Along with all of this, there’s also weekly levels that is something I’ve never seen before. After you beat the game, you unlock a small island below Australia (Tasmania) and from there, you will be connected to whichever servers and be able to download free weekly chapters. At the time of writing, there are two chapters which you can unlock, with a total of 10 levels each.

Final Thoughts

This game is a must-buy. Apps have become something that you play when you want to kill time, enjoy yourself, and sometimes challenge yourself. This game manages to do all of these in a simple, elegant, fun way. While this game may not be the longest of its kind, it is definitely something I think everyone should check out. To see some gameplay, here’s a short video of Chase trying to play the game and get through some extreme levels. Spoiler: He doesn’t.

About Shawn Wilkins

An enthusiastic writer who values quality over quantity. The abundance of posts shouldn't make the site, but rather, the quality of them. Aiming for perfection is the goal and anything less isn't acceptable. Long walks on the beach are accepted, however.